atch their faces. They were fine young men, with a certain
hardness and keenness of profile which promised well for France.
There was no shouting among them, no patriotic demonstrations, no
excitability. They stood waiting for their trains in a quiet, patient way,
chatting among themselves, smiling, smoking cigarettes, like soldiers
on their way to sham fights in the ordinary summer manoeuvres. The
town and village folk, who crowded about them and leaned over the
gates at the level crossings to watch our train, were more
demonstrative. They waved hands to us and cried out "Bonne
chance!" and the boys and girls chanted the Marseillaise again in
shrill voices. At every station where we halted, and we never let one
of them go by without a stop, some of the girls came along the
platform with baskets of fruit, of which they made free gifts to our
trainload of men. Sometimes they took payment in kisses, quite
simply and without any bashfulness, lifting their faces to the lips of
bronzed young men who thrust their kepis back and leaned out of the
carriage windows.

"Come back safe and sound, my little one," said a girl. "Fight well for
France!"

"I do not hope to come back," said a soldier, "but I shall die fighting."

21

The fields were swept with the golden light of the sun, and the heavy
foliage of the trees sang through every note of green. The white
roads of France stretched away straight between the fields and the
hills, with endless lines of poplars as their sentinels, and in clouds of
greyish dust rising like smoke the regiments marched with a steady
tramp. Gun carriages moved slowly down the roads in a glare of sun
which sparkled upon the steel tubes of the field artillery and made a
silver bar of every wheel-spoke. I heard the creak of the wheels and
the rattle of the limber and the shouts of the drivers to their teams;
and I thrilled a little every time we passed one of these batteries
because I knew that in a day or two these machines, which were
being carried along the highways of France, would be wreathed with
smoke denser than the dust about them now, while they vomited forth
shells at the unseen enemy whose guns would answer with the roar
of death.

Guns and men, horses and wagons, interminable convoys of
munitions, great armies on the march, trainloads of soldiers on all the
branch lines, soldiers bivouacked in the roadways and in market
places, long processions of young civilians carrying bundles